Recent reviews by Anvilarion

The game is great and offers a lot of replayability. The difficulty can be scaled between more than two dozen levels so regardless of whether you want a chill experience or be challenged, you will find something.
It is not a traditional city builder though. You will build several settlements and the goal is more or less to complete them as fast as possible and then move on to the next one. You will not get to the point where you sit back and just watch everything run like a clockwork because before that happens you will have won and moved on to the next settlement.

I am just writing this to get the last badge of the steam awards. Game is good, though.

I like this game and the fact that it still receives free updates is just great.

Sadly this is another bug-ridden game that does have more DLCs than quality assurance.

After starting it for the forst time I already got several "NULL ACCESS" error messages with a complete stack trace (with absolute paths of the development machine), which leads me to believe that not only was this game never really tested, but also that I am probably delivered a debug build with unintened information disclosure.

Going to the forums, I realized that I dodged a bullet by only starting to play after the latest DLC, as that DLC erased all save games and achievement progress for the players. All that can be seen from the developer is an "oops, sorry, won't happen again" answer. Although apparently this is not the first time this has happend. So if ou want to go for one of the endurance achievements, make a beeline for it, as you will never know when you have to start over again.

The newest "patch" from today makes it so that the game is not playable anymore for non-english players.

Speaking of non-english: Apparently someone wanted to save money on the translations by building plurals just by appending an "s" at the end of the words. Something, that shouldn't even work in English, let alone in any other language so you end up with great neologisms like "Hauss" or "Dorfbewohners" in the German version.

There is also a bug where the game seems to randomly put background applications on another screen, which is really fun, if that application happens to be a fullscreen application....

tl;dr Lots of game-breaking bugs. If you think about buying it, just wait a few years until the game is finished and then reconsider if you want to buy it.

UPDATE:

After all this time, the game still receives DLCs. The trust of the players, however, is rapidly dwindling: At the time of this writing, only 1.2% of players have won a game with the clan of the lion, which was introduced in the "Cross of Vidar" DLC. The latest DLC introduced the clan of the stoat and only 0.4% of players have won a game with it. Over the course of one DLC two thirds of players have lost interest.

And for good reason:
The game is still horribly buggy. Bugs range from annoying (neutral and AI units getting stuck) to game-breaking (units vanishing upon loading a save, AI settling on impassable tiles) to disastrous (memory leak causing 50 GB in RAM usage, UI freezing). Every new "patch" introduces new bugs and it always takes some time for the players to find them.

At this point I recommend to not buy this game. Feel free to look at what people have to say about other games from the developer as some of them also seem to suffer from quality problems.

It is a great game if you ever thought "I love Age of Empires, I just wish the wayfinding wasn't as good"

This is a game which should be researched quite a bit before you buy it. The reasons are:

1. Content: The game (without DLC) contains only 4 scenarios. Each of them takes me about 2 - 4 hours to complete. In addition to that there is an endless mode.
2. Morale: Part of the game's difficulty comes from morale decisions and many of them have no (negative) gameplay implications other than trying to make you feel bad.
3. Additional Goals: This ties in a bit with point 2. All scenarios have some sort of additional goal which is not required to win the scenario. Basically often you have to set your own goals. So if you do not want to go for a perfect win or for the achievements you are losing quite some challenges and play time.
4. Bugs: I have never played a game which is so bug-ridden. The problem is that some patches even introduce bugs, so you never know what is broken, or what works on a given patch. You can easily verify this if you go to the formus and see that ~30% of the threads are in the bugs forum. So you should look up which bugs currently exist in the game.
(5.DLCs: They vary greatly in quality as you can see from their reviews.)
(6.Translations are wonky at times: In the german translation for example the game switches between formal and informal pronouns.)

If you are fine with this, you are rewarded with a game that is rich in atmosphere and takes you to a beautifully crafted world. The scenarios (not the endless mode) are all crafted in a way that keeps you on your toes. Whenever you think, that you are on top of things, usually another event pops up and requires you to rethink your situation, which is something I enjoyed because it means that the scenarios stay interesting.

A big plus for this game is the amount of passion, which apparently went into making it. Even now the developers are still active in the discussion boards of the game and are eager to fix every bug and answer all the questions.

This is more of a work of art and to a lesser extent a game. While you can figure out the best skills easily which will carry you through the whole fightig part of the game, the game world, art, and music are something truly to be admired. If you play this, take your time to appreciate the game world and all the little pieces and dialogues whilch make this a unique experience.

I am of two minds about this game. On the one hand the RPG system is quite interesting and the story is as well. On the other hand it seems like the developers lost interest more and more during the game. While there are many gameplay elements introduced in the first chapter, they are less and less used in later chapters, which renders certain skills and talents irrelevant. The story seems to degrade as well. Ultimately I would still recommend the game for the first 2.5 chapters though.

While the game itself is nice, the company has recently added a new launcher to use its own game as advertisement space.
The launcher apparently prevents people from even playing the game.
On top of that they changed the EULA to allow them to farm your data with the new launcher and save it at a place "which might have lower data protection standards". If you don't want this, it says "you shouldn't play the game".
This betrays bad business practices and it could happen with any game you buy/bought from them.